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The future is an unknown quantity. I help to teach tomorrow's Prime Ministers, space explorers, inventors, musicians, CEOs, University Graduates and . . .
I have a responsibility to learn with them and to give them strategies they can use in tomorrow's world. I need to help to develop a love of learning in them so that they might solve those problems my generation can't.
I don't have all the answers, this blog is a reflection of some of the things that have and haven’t worked for me.

Posts

The lovely people at Core Ed have just sent out the acceptance letters for Ulearn presentations and I'm on the yes list! I'm excited about sharing the great things that are happening at our school with other educators and the best bit hearing what other educators are doing at their schools.

I really hope I can create a few 'ah ha' moments for people and that they can leave the workshops I'm presenting with something they can take back to the students and teachers in their school and make it their own.

I didn't think I'd be this happy about being accepted to present at Ulearn but I guess it's kind of like getting a certificate for moving up a couple of reading levels, I've worked hard to get here and I'm happy to be recognised for that. I wonder as educators, actually I know as educators we don't celebrate success enough. When was the last time you got excited about being able to share your learning with someone?

I had a great time creating choose your own adventure stories this week in a year 4/5 class. This was their first attempt at creating stories like this, it was a hit. They really enjoyed the experience and were engaged for pretty much the whole time we were doing the activity.

We've completed two stories and posted them to the class blog. You can read them here. I'm sure we'll pop up a few more over the next week or so.

If I did it again with them I'd probably work a little slower, perhaps a bit more scaffolding before launching them into writing their own stories. I'd also tidy up the planning we used. With that in mind I've created a Google Presentation to use with children the next time I try this out..

One of the things I talked about in team meeting this week was the possibility of creating digital badges for our classroom blogs. This was aimed at fostering a bit of healthy competition and some pride from the students for their classroom blog.

I think they're a great idea, we'll see how it goes with our students.

I've had a look around and there are some great online editors for digital badges that range from simply creating an image and downloading it then passing it on to creating a whole credit giving and acceptance system for badges. At the moment I'm working with Credly it was pretty simple to setup and we'll see how it goes for distributing badges easily to our class blogs.

I've create a page on this blog with a few more details about the badges we're currently using, please have a look and feel free to give a few suggestions.